The biomedical research base and the pilot and feasibility projects in the proposed Core Center all require mineral analysis at high spatial resolution. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy is well suited for the study of both hard and soft tissues. It provides information on all tissue compartments, including mineral, mineral substituting carbonate, collagen, non-collagenous proteins, lipids, and proteoglycans. The Infrared (IR) Imaging Core will provide standard FTIR analyses along with infrared images acquired using a newly developed methodology. The recent availability of an IR array detector that can acquire 4096x4096 pixels of data at 7 m resolution offers the potential for data acquisition at 1000 times that of the conventional IR microscope at a much higher spatial resolution. In order to increase the efficiency of data acquisition on projects that already are using FTIR Microspectroscopy and to develop and validate new parameters which previously could not be obtained without the array detector, the IR Imaging Core requests funds to establish the core around the newly acquired FTS 6000 Stingray Infrared Microimaging System. On-going studies that will benefit from this instrumentation address specific questions about mineralized and non-mineralized connective tissues important to the study of bone development. These include how lipid phases change in the stratum corneum, how altered expression of non- collagenous matrix proteins affect bone mineral content and mineral properties, which is the effect of similar modification on the mineral and matrix formed in chondrocyte cultures, how does IL-6 affect bone mineral properties in vitro and in vivo, what are the mineral and matrix characteristics around loaded and unleaded osteocytes, how does the mineral changes as microdamage propagates, how does osteoarthritis alter bone mineral and matrix properties in a mouse model, what is the origin of bone fragility in osteogenesis imperfecta, and what are the changes in mineral and matrix that occur in osteoporosis and are they corrected by treatment with various therapeutic modalities.